Married to and not with

Factual Questions
1

Background - I teach EFL classes in Japan. Yesterday a student asked a good question of another teacher for which none of the 3 teachers at school had a good answer. Why do we sy “get married to (someone)” but not “get married with (someone)”?

2

IANAExpert, but to me the ‘to’ implies movement and subsequent attachement - ‘with’ implies usage; consider the following:

“Weld this bracket to the side of that beam”
makes sense, but

“Weld this bracket with the side of that beam”
implies that one is to use the beam to weld the bracket, when one is actually going to use a welding machine.

3

The real answer is that prepositions are to a large extent arbitrary and generally can’t be translated literally from one language to another.

4

What ascenray said. If you translate the Spanish idiom (casarse con), it means “to marry with.” Russian is even worse; there are actually gender-differentiated verbs and idiom structures. For men, it’s “to to marry (or “to wife oneself”) on,” while for women, it’s literally translated as “to go behind the man.”

When I learned that in first-year Russian, I must have been making quite an unhappy feminist face in class, because even the professor noticed.

5

Because “to marry” is a verb with a connotation of attaching oneself. You are joined in matrimony with each other, but each of you joins him/herself to the other.

6

There seems to be considerable overlap in the use of TO vs WITH. Like saying “Parallel with or to the road” seem the mean the same thing. When I’m saying goodbye, I say “I’ll talk with you later” instead of “I’ll talk to you later.” To me, with implies a two-way conversation but to implies a one-way or a lecture, but that may just be because of being a parent for over 30 years. Being talked to, wasn’t a good thing.

Dictionary.com gives 27 definitions for with and 16 for to as prepositions. I think the key to your question is in definition 6 of the word to: "Used to indicate appropriation or possession: looked for the top to the jar." A “top with the jar” doesn’t mean quite the same thing as a “top to the jar.” The first means more proximity while the second means they go together.

Either that or I don’t have any idea either.

Jim